Shutting down of ideas

Re: Shutting down of ideas

fvkasm2x wrote: Gun control, pride parades, X on birth certificates and tearing down racist statues have absolutely nothing to do with the survival of our species.

Sorry. We’ll just have to agree to disagree on this point. Growing xenophobia, racism and hate, intolerance to that which is different, nationalism, populism, isolationism, civil war, race war, revolution and jihad (in an age of armed militias, nuclear and bio weapons) all have something to do with the survival of our species – at least with the survival of civilization as we know it.

That may not be a bad thing for the long term survival of our species as a whole. Wipe out 60 to 70 % of the global population through hate-inspired conflict and start all over again. Hmmm. Imagine that world. Internet gone. Global infrastructure decimated. Small tribes, each easily individually controlled in isolation and scattered around the globe. Only the strongest and most vicious surviving. A Conservative’s dream.

Not the world more idyllic dreamers and most futurists were hoping for 50 to 100 years from now; a world of diversity, inclusion and tolerance of others with a system of global democracy, a fully educated and participating population, shared resources and a united and cooperative species venturing to the stars. Ya, just a silly dream – although sadly, one that could actually be possible (but not if we continue trying to isolate ourselves from each other).

Social and cultural evolution will continue and we will all play a role in where it leads. The question is what do we as a race want to see for our future 100 years from now? A world of tribes living in isolated fear of each other, or a world with a fully participating population working in cooperation to safeguard this planet while reaching to the stars to find others like ours? One ideological influence, embracing education, science, diversity and inclusion looks to that latter future. Another looks to the past, a direction impossible to travel but one they insist on pursuing despite the destructive consequence.

Worth another look …

f/22 wrote: Need for human basics

“ . . . Never before in human history the earth has been populated with so many individuals, and never before humans have had to live in such big and culturally mixed populations. And maybe also never before there was such a need for understanding and agreement between different cultures about the basics of our human nature and about universal human values as in our divided and contradictory world of today. . . .”

Re: Shutting down of ideas

Posted: Aug 28th, 2017, 8:03 am

by fvkasm2x

Ka-El wrote:That may not be a bad thing for the long term survival of our species as a whole. Wipe out 60 to 70 % of the global population through hate-inspired conflict and start all over again. Hmmm. Imagine that world. Internet gone. Global infrastructure decimated. Small tribes, each easily individually controlled in isolation and scattered around the globe. Only the strongest and most vicious surviving. A Conservative’s dream.

lol YOu just can't help yourself hey? We had a few good pages of dialogue going...

Probably 80% of my social circle is Conservative and I've never heard anyone say they want anything that you've just described as their "dream world."

Let's try to stick to logical debate without the ridiculous claims about either political party taking over this thread, as there are already like 9 or 10 of those threads lol

Re: Shutting down of ideas

Posted: Aug 28th, 2017, 9:29 am

by Ka-El

fvkasm2x wrote: We had a few good pages of dialogue going...

So don't try and derail it now.

fvkasm2x wrote: Probably 80% of my social circle is Conservative and I've never heard anyone say they want anything that you've just described as their "dream world."

One thing about conservative thought (in my opinion) is the inability to recognize we cannot go backward in time, along with the inability to imagine the long term consequence of regressive policies that try to take us backward.

fvkasm2x wrote: Let's try to stick to logical debate without the ridiculous claims about either political party taking over this thread, ...

When I refer to liberalism and conservatism I am referring to ideologies (ideas) of political thought as they relate to humans and societies, not some partisan loyalty to some party that may or may not espouse the ideals they try to pretend to represent.

(oops - I see I used a capital for Conservative. My bad. Sorry)

Let's carry on

Re: Shutting down of ideas

Posted: Aug 28th, 2017, 2:45 pm

by f/22

Just to interleave here.

One of the most original thinkers and idea pitchers on the planet.

Many times, he’s been ‘shut down,’ but he just keeps coming on and will do so ‘til the day he dies.

Wendell Berry likes to call himself ‘just a farmer.’

Re: Shutting down of ideas

Posted: Aug 28th, 2017, 3:24 pm

by f/22

LOL, but speaking of the past and the future here, Berry does try to shut down (eh-hem, ‘modify’) one particular big idea.

Here's an excerpt from: Standing by Words (the conclusion).

By: Wendell Berry

<snip>

People who are willing to follow technology wherever it leads are necessarily willing to follow it away from home, off the earth, and outside the sphere of human definition, meaning, and responsibility. One has to suppose that this would be all right if they did it only for themselves and if they accepted the terms of their technological romanticism absolutely—that is, if they would depart absolutely from all that they propose to supersede, never to return. But past a certain scale, as C.S. Lewis wrote (21), the person who makes a technological choice does not choose for himself alone, but for others; past a certain scale, he chooses for all others. Past a certain scale, if the break with the past is great enough, he chooses for the past, and if the effects are lasting enough he chooses for the future. He makes, then, a choice that can neither be chosen against nor unchosen. Past a certain scale, there is no dissent from a technological choice.

People speaking out of this technological willingness cannot speak precisely, for what they are talking about does not yet exist. They cannot mean what they say because their words are avowedly speculative. They cannot stand by their words because they are talking about, if not, in, the future, where they are not standing and cannot stand until long after they have spoken. All the grand and perfect dreams of the technologists are happening in the future, but nobody is there.

What can turn us from this deserted future, back into the sphere of our being, the great dance that joins us to or home, to each other and to other creatures, to the dead and the unborn? I think it is love. I am perforce aware how baldly and embarrassing that word now lies on the page—for we have learned at once to overuse it, abuse it, and hold it in suspicion. But I do not mean any kind of abstract love (adolescent, romantic, or “religious”), which is probably a contradiction in terms, but particular love for particular things, places, creature, and people, requiring stands and acts, showing its successes or failures in practical or tangible effects. And it implies a responsibility just as particular, not grim or merely dutiful, but rising out of generosity. I think that this sort of love defines the effective range of human intelligence, the range within which its forks can be dependably beneficent. Only the action that is moved by love for the good at hand has the hope of being responsible and generous. Desire for the future produces words that cannot be stood by. But love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows. One cannot love the future or anything in it, for nothing is known there. And one cannot unselfishly make a future for someone else. The love for the future is self-love—love for the present self, projected and magnified into the future, and it is an irremediable loneliness.

Because love is not abstract, it does not lead to trends or percentages or general behavior. It leads, on the contrary, to the perception that there is not such thing as general behavior. There is no abstract action. Love proposes the work of settled households and communities, whose innovations come about in response to immediate needs and immediate conditions, as opposed to the work of governments and corporations, whose innovations are produced out of the implicitly limitless desire for future power of profit. This difference is the unacknowledged cultural break in Mr. Fuller’s (the author of Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth) evolutionary series: oxen, horse-drawn vehicles, horseless vehicles, ships of the sky. Between horse-drawn vehicles and horseless vehicles human life disconnected itself from local sources; energy started to flow away from home. A biological limit was overrun, and with it the deepest human propriety.

Or, to shift the terms, love defines the difference between the “global village” which is a technological and a totalitarian ideal, directly suited to the purposes of centralized governments and corporations, and the Taoist village-as-globe, where the people live frugally and at peace, pleased with the good qualities of necessary things, so satisfied where they are that they live and die without visiting the next village, though they can hear its dogs bark and its roosters crow (22).

We might conjecture and argue a long time about the meaning and even the habitability of such a village. But one thing, I think, is certain: it would not be a linguistic no man’s land in which words and things, words and deeds, words and people failed to stand in reliable connection or fidelity to one another. People and other creatures would be known by their names and histories, not by their numbers or percentages. History would be handed down in songs and stories, not reduced to evolutionary or technological trends. Generalisations would exist, of course, but they wold be distilled from experience, not “projected” from statistics. They would sound, says Lo Tzu (23), this way:

“Alert as a winter-farer on and icy stream,”

“Wary as a man in ambush,”

“Considerate as a welcome guest,”

“Selfless as melting ice,”

“Green as an uncut tree,”

“Open as a valley . . .”

I come, in conclusion, to the difference between “projecting” the future and making a promise. The “projecting” of the “futurologist” uses the future as the safest possible context for whatever is desired; it binds one only to selfish interest. But making a promise binds one to someone else’s future. If the promise is serious enough, one is brought to it by love, and in awe and fear. Fear, awe, and love bind us to not selfish aims, but to each other. And they enforce a speech more exact, more clarifying, and more binding than any speech that can be used to sell or advocate some “future.” For when we promise in love and awe and fear there is a certain kind of mobility that we give up. We give up the romanticism of progress, that is always shifting its terms to fit its occasions. We are speaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in the presence of what we have said.